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In a recent interview Gabe Newell states that Valve is beyond episodic content. And when there's no episodic content, there's no Episode 3 and when there's no more Episode 3? Half-Life 3.

Here's a gist of the interview:

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Gabe Newell told Develop that the episodic development philosophy has been replaced wholesale by the ‘games as a service’ model.

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The ‘games as a service’ credo is to create games that are platforms in themselves; content that can be rapidly reconstructed through a series of updates.

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“For me, ‘entertainment as a service’ is a clear distillation of the episodic content model,” Newell added..

A major factor in the need for reform was the wellbeing of Valve’s developers, Newell said.

Newell revealed to Develop that, throughout the Half-Life 2 project, he became acutely aware of his responsibility to look after his team.

“I’ve become obsessed with this issue now,” he said..

QUOTEBut Valve is nevertheless moving on. Its new approach is to embed itself in its community of 30 million Steam customers.

The idea is to obtain as much feedback from the community as possible, and in return build entertainment that capitalises on their tastes.

This is not a content creation philosophy limited to games; Valve has made short animations and comics from this approach.

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“Team Fortress 2 is the fastest frequency we work on with comparatively fast updates. Er, Half-Life is apparently the slowest! [Laughs] Although, from the outside world, we have no evidence that Half-Life is working on any frequency at all. [Laughs].

There is a line of thought that when someone jumps the gap from one of the useful trades and uses full on business speak (and I think I might have just won buzzword bingo not to mention it screamed backpedalling) they cease to be useful.

Well it is not like I ever really invested in Half life.

"The ‘games as a service’ credo is to create games that are platforms in themselves; content that can be rapidly reconstructed through a series of updates"

There is a line of thought that when someone jumps the gap from one of the useful trades and uses full on business speak (and I think I might have just won buzzword bingo not to mention it screamed backpedalling) they cease to be useful.

Well it is not like I ever really invested in Half life.

"The ‘games as a service’ credo is to create games that are platforms in themselves; content that can be rapidly reconstructed through a series of updates"

Lucasarts if think they just nabbed your old model (see SCUMMVM).

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Brilliant summation. (No, that is not sarcasm: the bolded is pretty much 100% spot-on.)

Well I think it boils down to whether or not they are going to charge for these dynamic game updating services. I mean, you can't just put out a partial amount of the game and try to evolve it through updates without breaking much of the older content or expecting people to pay for sub sections of the game just to finish it. Blizzard has been doing this for almost 6 years with World of WarCraft and the vast quantity of data that is coming out with every update is just bogging down players computers and making the game load slower. I'd hope that after the current expansion they move onto actually releasing a fresh new version of WoW with updated graphics engines and better physics, God knows they have the finances to do it, but with all the patch and update data the game has reached almost 30GB and it started at less than 4GB 6 years ago.

Having dynamic game evolution would be fine so long as they are consistently releasing updates to a game and don't just kill it outright, not to mention the updates need to be reasonable in size in order for people to not exceed their bandwidth every few weeks when updates come out.

Well I think it boils down to whether or not they are going to charge for these dynamic game updating services. I mean, you can't just put out a partial amount of the game and try to evolve it through updates without breaking much of the older content or expecting people to pay for sub sections of the game just to finish it. Blizzard has been doing this for almost 6 years with World of WarCraft and the vast quantity of data that is coming out with every update is just bogging down players computers and making the game load slower. I'd hope that after the current expansion they move onto actually releasing a fresh new version of WoW with updated graphics engines and better physics, God knows they have the finances to do it, but with all the patch and update data the game has reached almost 30GB and it started at less than 4GB 6 years ago.

Having dynamic game evolution would be fine so long as they are consistently releasing updates to a game and don't just kill it outright, not to mention the updates need to be reasonable in size in order for people to not exceed their bandwidth every few weeks when updates come out.

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Have you played Team Fortress 2? Or to a much lesser extent, the Left 4 Dead games? I highly doubt Valve is going to start charging for updates when they're known for giving free updates.

Well I think it boils down to whether or not they are going to charge for these dynamic game updating services. I mean, you can't just put out a partial amount of the game and try to evolve it through updates without breaking much of the older content or expecting people to pay for sub sections of the game just to finish it. Blizzard has been doing this for almost 6 years with World of WarCraft and the vast quantity of data that is coming out with every update is just bogging down players computers and making the game load slower. I'd hope that after the current expansion they move onto actually releasing a fresh new version of WoW with updated graphics engines and better physics, God knows they have the finances to do it, but with all the patch and update data the game has reached almost 30GB and it started at less than 4GB 6 years ago.

Having dynamic game evolution would be fine so long as they are consistently releasing updates to a game and don't just kill it outright, not to mention the updates need to be reasonable in size in order for people to not exceed their bandwidth every few weeks when updates come out.

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Have you played Team Fortress 2? Or to a much lesser extent, the Left 4 Dead games? I highly doubt Valve is going to start charging for updates when they're known for giving free updates.